Trying to be an innovator in the quagmire of online second language acquisition.

The journey to here has been sporadic, enlightening and complicated. I have lived in China for four and a half years, all together. I met my wife there. Got married there. Taught English there. My first three year stint was from 2007 to 2010. I then returned with my wife, and the two children we had made, to live and work there again.

In between, I had not taught English as a second language. I tried to be an artist, a painter, worked in a call center, in a funeral parlour and buried my head in the sand. The funeral parlor bit is not actually true. During my time away from second language teaching I had assumed that the industry would have moved on a little. Changed, improved, become more robust and successful. However, I found that the only success was being had by the slew of companies running the schools.

We returned in 2018. This move was meant to be long term. I had been offered a job as a Recruitment and HR manager for a British run school in Qingdao, China. My wife wanted to be nearer her aging parents and tho let them see more of the kids while they were growing up, and her parents where growing old. We booked a flight for the 27th of January 2020, to come back to the UK and stay with my sister and her family for a few weeks. As we boarded our plane, China was at the height of the panic of Covid. What was this deadly disease, and where we getting out of Dodge just as it was beginning to crumble?

Well, it seemed like that at the time. It is now November and we are still staying at my sister’s. It has truly been a strange and upside down type of world for the last eight months.

So, why am I still staying in Second Language teaching this time. Well, having seen and experienced it again, I feel it really needs a kick up the tundra. So here I am, experimenting with new and different strategies to help people acquire English as a second language. add another page.